Category: Website

The very first thing I want to say is thank you to the whole bunch of you who clicked on the PayPal link on the left, and contributed to the running of this website. This may not be the most personal way to say thanks, I just didn’t want random emails ending up in your PayPal inbox.

I was trying to run this website all by myself, but I think I fell to the Dunning-Kruger curse and thought I could become an HTML5/PHP/Javascript expert by spending a few hours on Google. Yes, the irony was profound. I suddenly figured out that learning computer code is about as hard as learning epidemiology.

So, I hired someone to clean up the code, which caused lousy performance. My pages were loading in like 30 seconds, which 15 years ago would have been amazing. My IT guy (he’s a guy and he’s in IT, so there we go) had to look over like 15000 lines of code. He found the problem in like the 14,000th line, which is just my luck. Not that it matters but putting a “;” in the wrong place can be the death of a website.

So, it appears that pages now load in 1-5 seconds. Thanks IT guy.

He has some more code to clean up (I was sloppy). And we’ve got a boatload of re-directs to fix. He also removed a dangling piece of code that sometimes redirected the main page to a MySpace page. Of course, that begs the question of “who uses MySpace anymore?”

We’ll see if these fixes are actually permanent. I think an anti-vaccination shill has haunted my website.

With these fixes, I’m actually back to having fun writing here. The page loading problems made writing a 2000 word article tedious. Page loads cost me hours of writing time, and I was seriously ready to give up.

In some other news, Big Pharma still hasn’t sent me Shill Payments™ yet. If anyone knows who to speak to at Big Agra, Big Pharma, and Big Evolution, please tell me. I fell as though they’re using me.

So, if you have a chance, look at the left column, and you can contribute to running and maintenance of this blog with a simple PayPal click. Anything helps. I promise to remove it once the Shill Payments™ gold bars are shipped.

Please, no one who has contributed should do it again. Unless, of course, you received your Shill Payments™ gold bars. Then help out a fellow shill.

I feel like I just did one of those NPR contribution drives. “If we raise $10,000 in the next 30 minutes, Big Pharma will match the contribution.”

The Skeptical Raptor website – and its blog – has been a labor of love for just short of three years. There are over 600 posts, or about one every couple of days. That’s a lot of writing, especially since I think many of these topics require three or four thousand words to cover all of the information.

A few months ago, I had to move to a dedicated server because of the popularity of this blog. The Skeptical Raptor website was accidentally crashing other smaller websites that sat on a shared server. We’ve fixed that. Good for everybody!

Since I was moving to a better server, I went through the process to upgrade the website to something a lot more modern. And more complicated.

I have been spending a lot of time rewriting or editing a lot of the more popular posts (some have had over a half-million page views) for lots of reasons. So it may seem like I’m taking the easy route and just republishing the good stuff. If it were that easy.

Generally, this is what I do to the revised posts:

Fix outbound and internal links.

Check for new research that may enhance or contradict my points.

Fix spelling errors, grammar and style.

Change images to higher quality.

Subdivide huge articles into smaller ones.

Modernize the format.

So when I republish an article, it’s almost a new one. But if you read it before, take the time to read it again. There will be new information, hopefully helpful to answering the question you’re asking.

Lastly, it’s very expensive running this website. And the Shill Payments™ from Big Vaccine, Big Pharma, Big Agra and Big Evolution aren’t reaching the levels I want to maintain this website and keep my Ferrari running. And I’ve had to lay off my personal Big Pharma gold bar polisher last week. It’s a rough world.

In the left column, you can contribute to running and maintenance of this blog with a simple PayPal click. Anything helps. I’ll remove it once the Shill Payments™ gold bars are shipped. But seriously, this website was once a hobby and now is a money pit. Fun, but a money pit.

Some of you use Google’s Feedburner system to get notified of posts here and other blogs. Unfortunately, Google has deprecated Feedburner and no long supports it (and hasn’t since 2012). I’ve begun to notice a lot of errors crop up (not just here but from other blogs) from Feedburner emails.

As a result, I’ve removed all subscription links to Feedburner from this website. You can subscribe through RSS feeds (if you prefer), email, or any social networking. It all works easily. There are subscriptions links in the column to the left (or right, I may make a change).

For fans, haters, and those looking for information, you probably knew that this website and blog wasn’t working for the last 7 days. Obviously, we’re back.

I won’t give you the long story, but the short one was that I was stressing out the servers for the old web host, because so many people were reading my articles. It’s one of those good news/bad news situations. Daily, I had issues with the website going down, because I temporarily exceeded limits of the servers. My website emails me when it disappears from the internet, and I was getting 50 a day.

I tried to stick with the old web host for as long as I could, but they finally had enough, because there were so many hits here, it was impacting performance on other websites that they hosted. This host were really good people, but they focus on small websites, not like my monster. To protect their server, the old web host locked out portions of my website, which wasn’t fair, but I was violating their terms of service for number of hits. I was over by a 1000X.

So, in one day, I had to find the best host for my needs, determine if they had a good rating (they did) amongst users, pay for it all, transfer my website, then….WAIT. The internet doesn’t work very efficiently, as I’ve found out. Lots of people and things get involved with domain names and transfers. Lots of secret codes need to be emailed. And then you wait.

Now, while I was waiting, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t run tests. I couldn’t write articles. I just waited. It was like a vacation, except checking with the new web host every hour to see what was going on. I think they were annoyed.

Finally, today, the domain name officially transferred, then…problems. Too numerous to mention, but finally it all worked.

There will be lots of new articles. And we’ll have fun. I’m actually redesigning this website to be even more efficient with new graphics, but I think I’ve done enough this month. If you run into any problems with any links or anything whatsoever with this website, just comment here, or send a tweet to @skepticalraptor.

Actually, it’s not so annual, cause this is the first time I’ve done it, more or less.

I started this blog in January 2012. Just three years ago. I really didn’t know what subjects would be my focus, but it was science generally. I kind of wandered around for the first few months, before I think I hit my stride with vaccines, junk medicine, evolution (though I really need to move back into that area), and other things that captured my interest.

In January 2012, I had precisely 262 page views. For the whole month. I really thought “why bother.” For 2012, I had 184,000 page views, which still made me wonder if the effort was worth it.

In November 2014, I had over 278,000 unique page views, meaning I did more in November than I did in all of 2012. For 2014, I had nearly 1.2 million unique page views, which meant this website is ranked 278,000th in the world. OK, that sounds terrible, except that there’s 1,200,000,000 (1.2 billion if you hate counting zeroes) websites on the interwebs as of this moment. So this blog ranks in the top 0.023% of all websites on the internet. It’s no Facebook or Amazon, but then again, I have reach goals for this blog, and those aren’t it!

My goal is to provide scientific evidence for science and medicine, while doing the same against pseudoscientific myths and memes that are popular on the social networks. I do it with my style–take no prisoners, and use the highest standards of evidence. I refuse to accept a cherry-picked study that supports an a priori conclusion, when the scientific consensus, based on a mountainous body of evidence, is a formidable fortress of knowledge.

On 8 June 2014, I switched the comment system from Facebook based to Disqus, a different kind of commenting system. There were a few reasons for this decision:

Facebook allowed too much spam in here. Because of Facebook’s tracking system, spammers could target fake comments that might be attractive to readers of various articles. It was almost creepy in how this spam fit with what was written

You have to be on Facebook to comment in a Facebook environment, and there are a lot of people who did not want to set up a Facebook account. I empathize with that, so Disqus allows for several types of login, including setting up an account that is not on any social network.

Disqus allows for threading of comments, which cannot be done with the Facebook system.

Facebook constantly changed it’s programming which would break the comments section for a day or two every few weeks. It was frustrating, and because Facebook refused to publish its changes, they would happen without warning.

Facebook had a binary moderation mode, either on or off. Disqus has a more vibrant one.

You can up vote and down vote Disqus comments. This let’s the casual reader know who has contributed something useful to the conversation.

I pulled the switch on the change this afternoon. There are a few issues here and there, including a boatload of missing comments. I’m trying to recover them, and some have shown up, but others are being recalcitrant. They’re not lost for me, as I can see them in my database, but making the database talk to Disqus has been a challenge. Eventually it will be all worked out. I want to be able to see all of the antisemitic remarks for the Oberführer of whale.to.

A lot of websites now use Disqus, and it’s pretty easy to remain logged on, so that you can comment to your heart’s content across the internet. Because you know, one day, we will correct all of the mistakes on the internet. OK, maybe correcting the mistakes on Wikipedia will have to suffice.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or complaints, leave them here. Maybe I can fix them. Maybe I can’t. Maybe in a year, I’ll switch back to Facebook Comments. Probably not.

At 2000 PDT (you can convert that here), my website will be offline for a few hours. I’m upgrading security with a built-in anti-hacking virus, that causes the attacking computer to just hit Justin Bieber arrest sites. You’ve been warned.

Plum hamantaschen. Slurp.

Yes, I get several hundred hack attempts per day. I automatically trace every hack attempt, and it’s rather amusing how dumb people are. Like I’m going to use a simple password here. Or keep server backdoors open. Vaccine refuser cult members should get a job sweeping floors. Seriously.

Also, I’m moving to another data center for my server, so that’s going to happen. And we’re going to get fully vaccinated.

While doing this, I’m going eat some GMO filled hamantaschen. And you should be envious.

Occasionally, I receive thinly veiled questions about my integrity and ethics in the comments of various posts, in emails, or on social networking sites. Mostly, I laugh about them since they are a form of Ad hominem argument, called the Big Pharma Shill Gambit, where one side of an argument tries to dismiss the scientific evidence of another side by accusing them of being a paid mouthpiece for pharmaceutical companies. My response is generally to state that I am “polishing the gold bars stored in the basements of Big Pharma offices,” and I don’t get paid very much to do that–it’s just about the only answer worthy of the stupidity of these accusations.

The problem with actually trying to dismiss these accusations is that it’s nearly impossible to dismiss the accusations with evidence, because as we know, proving the negative is almost impossible. I could post my investment documents, and you will see that I own many shares of stock and mutual funds that invest in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Companies I might discuss might make up 0.1% of the holdings of the mutual fund, which means I own around 0.000000001% of a single Big Pharma company. Now, I am certainly not arrogant enough to believe that what I write has any effect on some company’s stock price, but if it did, I reap the rewards of ½¢. Woo hoo.

In just a few days, this website and blog will be exactly two years old. In the world of bloggers, I’m a newbie; in the science world of some blogs that have been around since the advent of the internet as we know it, I’m a mere infant. When I first started the blog in January 2012, I had a grand total of 262 visitors. For the whole month! Now, I’ll frequently get over 262 visitors in an hour. I’m just a few page views short of 1 million for the past 2 years. In 2014, I am hoping to exceed 1 million page views for the year.

Right now, according to Alexa (a website ranking service), this website is ranked #277,281. Out of six hundred million websites (give or take a couple), this one is in the top 0.05% of all websites on the internet. I make no pretense that I built this website’s ranking alone, I think I got lucky. I wrote a number of articles, that debunked common pseudoscience myths (wait, pseudoscience by definition is a myth), which became big hits on social media.

And I have readers from all over the world. Most of my readers are from English-speaking countries like the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. But I have boatloads of hits from Germany, France, Israel, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and many other countries. I try to remember that I’ve got an international audience, but I know some of my writing tends to be American focused. I try to resist the urge to use American metaphors, but sometimes it’s just not easy. Continue reading “The reasons why I write a blog–and a bit about chocolate”

Yesterday, technology failed me. This website and blog were down for about 8 hours on 20 November because a server at my data center was overrun by zombies. Well, that’s my story, and I’ll stick to it.

The web hosting company did its best to get things up and running, but there were some “glitches” (thank you President Obama for making that word a part of non-computer tech speak) today. One of the major problems is that a corrupt database has replicated all of the comments made on this blog, not one time, not two times, not three times, but ten times over. This commenting problem has overwhelmed my blog, so I had to do some creative unglitching of my website.

Thus, all comments now must come from registered users of Facebook, Yahoo or AOL. Not sure why the commenting system I chose to use requires Yahoo or AOL (does anyone use AOL anymore?). You cannot comment if you’re a registered user of this website anymore. Most people are logged into Facebook 24/7, so it shouldn’t be any problem. I’m experimenting with a couple of other commenting systems, including DISQUS, mainly because I like the way its set up.

Because of the problem with the comments, any comment made before this morning all appear as one date to me, so I can’t see more recent comments. I don’t reply to every comment, but I do choose to reply to a few. So, if I didn’t reply it could be because I’m rude and didn’t want to do so, or because my website decided to not to cooperate. But starting this morning, I see all of the comments in chronological order again, so if you post a comment that tells me to go jump in a lake, I’ll see it!

Speaking of comments, I do not censor any comments. You can call me names if you wish, though anything racist will be deleted, just on principle. You can disagree with me, and I may respond, but it will be a better conversation if you have peer-reviewed research supporting your point of view. And don’t cherry pick. I hate it.

And I delete spam, because it’s obnoxious. If you want to sell your honey/hemp oil magical cure, go to some hack’s website, like Mercola or Tenpenny. They don’t like science. And if you’re trying to sell my readers a fake Louis Vuitton bag, the spam filter gets that in a second. Less even. And if you’re going to type long winded comments over and over, I’m going to delete a few if they appear to be spam-ish.

So those are seriously simple commenting rules. No racism. Don’t attack other commenters (but attack me all you want). No selling junk medicine. No spamming. And you have to register through Facebook, but who’s not on Facebook anymore. I know, some of you think it’s a privacy issue. It isn’t. If you’re not a friend of the SkepticalRaptor on Facebook, there’s no way I can see anything that’s not public. And I don’t care to see it, since I’m more interested in writing.

Privacy Policy

This website does not collect any data about any specific user unless using the comment system, in which you log in through WordPress, Facebook or Yahoo. SkepticalRaptor.com does not capture nor store any login information, except when you post comments.

The website does collect information about each visitor's location (by country or state/province), pages visited, amount of time spent on each page, and other information such as in- and out-links. That information is not shared or sold to anyone. Period.

All visitor information is randomized, so no one would be able to tie any activity on this website with any specific IP address. If a law enforcement agency requested my records, they would be incapable of tying any IP address with any activity on this website.

Any threatening or harassing comments would be reported through the providers of the commenting system, whether it's Yahoo, Facebook, or WordPress.

If you have any questions about the privacy policy, you can contact me through the link on the home page of this website.